1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a method and system for data processing in general, and in particular to a method and system for avoiding livelocks within a computer system. Still more particularly, the present invention relates to a method and system for avoiding livelocks due to colliding writebacks within a non-uniform memory access computer system.
2. Description of the Prior Art
It is well-known in the computer arts that greater computer system performance can be achieved by combining the processing power of several individual processors to form a multiprocessor (MP) computer system. MP computer systems can be designed with a number of different topologies, depending on the performance requirements of a particular application. A symmetric multiprocessor (SMP) configuration, for example, is one of the simpler MP computer system topologies that are commonly used, in which resources such as a system memory are shared by multiple processors. The topology name "symmetric" stems from the fact that all processors within an SMP computer system have symmetric access to all resources within the system.
Although the SMP topology permits the use of relatively simple inter-processor communication and data sharing protocols, the SMP topology overall has a limited scalability and bandwidth, especially at the system memory level as the system scale increases. As a result, another MP computer system topology known as non-uniform memory access (NUMA) has emerged as an alternative design that addresses many of the limitations of the SMP topology, at the expense of some additional complexity.
A typical NUMA computer system includes a number of interconnected nodes. Each node includes at least one processor and a local "system" memory. The NUMA topology name stems from the fact that a processor has lower access latency with respect to data stored in the system memory at its local node than with respect to data stored in the system memory at a remote node. NUMA computer systems can be further classified as either non-cache coherent or cache coherent, depending on whether or not data coherency is maintained among caches in different nodes. The NUMA topology addresses the scalability limitations of the conventional SMP topology by implementing each node within a NUMA computer system as a smaller SMP system. Thus, the shared components within each node can be optimized for use by only a few processors, while the overall system benefits from the availability of larger scale parallelism with relatively low latency.
Despite all the various advantages, one particular concern with a NUMA system is the potential livelock problem that arises from the cache coherence protocol. For example, when a processor located at a remote node, which contains a modified copy of a cache line, attempts to cast the cache line out of its cache memory by issuing a writeback request to a home node at the same time a processor located at the home node is attempting to access the same cache line, a livelock situation can occur. Consequently, it would be desirable to provide a method for avoiding the above-mentioned livelock situation caused by colliding writebacks within a NUMA computer system.